Southern National

Southern National opened in Summerhill in the summer of 2023 at 72 Georgia Avenue, from chef Duane Nutter and restaurateur Reggie Washington — the James Beard-nominated pair behind One Flew South, the airport restaurant at Hartsfield-Jackson where Nutter broke the rules by putting fancy sushi, elevated Southern cooking and craft cocktails on a terminal menu. It followed an earlier Southern National in Birmingham, Alabama. Nutter was born in Louisiana and raised in Seattle, and calls the restaurant a compilation of his greatest hits; Atlanta Magazine's Christiane Lauterbach wrote in November 2023 that it announces itself from the get-go as an ambitious showcase. The cooking is globally inflected Southern — mussels with shiitake and bacon in Southern greens, berbere-spiced chicken thighs on maque choux, sheet-pan biscuits with pepper jelly.

The bar was created by Greg Best and Paul Calvert, the pair behind Ticonderoga Club and two of the most consequential bartenders in the city, and the non-alcoholic list carries that seriousness rather than sitting apart from it. The Young Mr. Collins is built on ISH London Botanical with lemon, cane sugar and soda. The Bluegrass Fizz uses a blueberry, lemongrass and thyme shrub with lime and sparkling water. The Bella Sparkler runs lemon and orange juice with pineapple syrup and tonic. A bottled St. Agrestis Phoney Negroni and Athletic Brewing's Run Wild non-alcoholic IPA round it out.

The shrub in the Bluegrass Fizz is the tell of who designed this list. A shrub is a vinegar-based fruit syrup — an old preservation method that pre-dates refrigeration — and vinegar does the one thing zero-proof drinks most often lack: it makes the drink finish dry and sharp instead of trailing off sweet. Bartenders of Best and Calvert's generation use it as a matter of course, and its presence here means the non-alcoholic drinks were built by the same hands and to the same standard as the rest.

Dinner runs Monday to Saturday, with brunch on Sundays.